Comparative analyses of consent rates in SHARE

An increasing amount of administrative and process-generated data is being made available for research purposes, which requires informed consent of respondents for ethical and legal reasons. To date, research examining how to best ask for linkage consent in a survey has mainly been conducted in English-speaking countries, primarily in the United States and the United Kingdom, but also in Germany.

In particular, there is a lack of comparable cross-national data on consent for data linkage in aging surveys. The Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) has implemented record linkage consent questions in several countries. While the procedure for obtaining consent is similar in all countries, the exact wording of the question as well as the administrative institution linking to is country-specific. The linkage consent rates between countries show large differences, even though the consent is obtained in a comparable manner from the same target population.

SHARE also offers a unique opportunity to further address this issue by including a hypothetical consent question in the questionnaire. This will allow us to use exactly the same wording in all countries, reducing country specificity and allowing us to examine the effects in different national contexts. The data will be collected during the SHARE pretest phase and the subsequent analysis will take place within the NIMLAS/NIH-funded project “Investigating Consent Rates for Linking Survey and Administrative Data in a Multilingual, Multinational, and Multicultural Context”.

This will help to understand how respondents in different countries and languages respond to linkage questions and provide important insights into correlations between individual characteristics and linkage agreement for different domains of administrative data. In the context of health and aging studies, the insights drawn from this project will be valuable in enhancing studies involving cross-national data linkage.